FULL CHAMBER APPLAUSE.

I recognize that it's largely rhetoric, but this is the sort of thing that unsettles me about Obama. From his State of the Union rebuttal:

Each year, as we watch the State of the Union, we see half the chamber rise to applaud the President and half the chamber stay in their seats. We see half the country tune in to watch, but know that much of the country has stopped even listening. Imagine if next year was different. Imagine if next year, the entire nation had a president they could believe in. A president who rallied all Americans around a common purpose. That’s the kind of President we need in this country. And with your help in the coming days and weeks, that’s the kind of President I will be.

It's an election, of course, and the participants have to say a lot of stuff. But the great question mark hanging over the Obama campaign is how much the candidate himself believes in this glowing vision of bipartisan adulation, how deeply he desires to make it manifest. Because the Republicans aren't going to slip quietly into that good night. When the Democrats sat stone-faced through the President's demand to extend his tax cuts, they weren't being partisan, they don't believe in extending the tax cuts. Similarly, when Republicans glare through a President Obama's promise to bring the troops home, or fight for universal, government-provided health care, they'll be following a mixture of their donors and their beliefs. That's fine. But will a President Obama be so stunned by that rebuke, so surprised that Republicans have suddenly stopped liking him, that he destabilizes his own agenda to bring them back into the fold? One of the odd quirks about Obama's history is that he's used to being disliked by establishment Democrats he challenges in primaries. He's really not used to ire from Republicans.